Grab your character sheets and pull up a chair, everyone! Today we’re returning to The Legend of Vox Machina, where the party most recently arrived at Percy’s ancestral home. There they were greeted with a ghoulish welcoming party: a line of corpses dressed up to resemble their own costumes. It’s clear that Vox Machina are not welcome in Whitestone, but as it turns out, party crashing is actually one of their specialties.

In terms of narrative/mechanical design, my most recent object of curiosity is the negotiation of the blank space that defines this party’s recent pre-history. Frequently, D&D parties assemble right at the beginning of a campaign, often bumping into each other at an inn and deciding to team up. That’s clearly not true of Vox Machina, who had apparently been traveling together for some time, but that “some time” feels oddly nebulous at this point. Dynamics like the growing affection between Vax and Keyleth, or Scanlan and Pike, feel divorced from any sense of communal pre-history, awkwardly highlighting the reality that this group was summoned into existence as a fully assembled unit. I’ll be interested to see if the show mitigates that by actually revealing how the party met, but there’s plenty of time for that; for now, we’ve clearly got more pressing concerns. Let’s face off with those nefarious Briarwoods, and get some goddamn loot!

Episode 6

We open on a resistance meeting, with the anti-Briarwood citizens of Whitestone planning their next move. I haven’t done a “resistance arc” yet myself, but it seems conceptually fun; leaning into concepts like sneaking and sabotage can force players to consider their characters in new ways, as more than just instruments for dispensing fireballs. I also like how contributing to a preexisting resistance somewhat decenters the players – it can be easy for campaigns to slip into a model where the party are the protagonists of the universe, which tends to undercut the solidity of your world, as well as any sense of urgency

Zombie giants discover the meeting, with predictably squelchy results

Apparently the resistance leader is Archibald

“Are you crazy? Out of the streets, hide!” I like this concept of a fully explorable city with “boss enemy” patrols that you can’t actually fight against. Another neat way of forcing the players to find solutions other than combat, and I also love missions where you get some kind of map at the start, and thus can plot out your plan of attack one step at a time. The more meaningful preparation your players are allowed, the more they feel a sense of ownership over the results of a given adventure

The resistance is using the de Rolo crest as their sign

“Little Percival, what have you become?” Keeper Yennen recognizes a change in Percy, presumably the dark pact or whatnot that his shadow was previously hinting towards. As someone playing a warlock who collects demonic pacts like trading cards, it’s hard for me to feel too intimidated by Percy and his one dark consort

Nice character-reflective comedy beat here, as Grog reveals he always believed he was the leader on account of his superior height, while Keyleth protests that they’re all co-leaders

Our heroes are assigned a resistance quest: save their captured leader, Archibald Desnay

Meanwhile, Pike is still on hold with the Everlight. Her separation from the party was so arbitrary that I had to assume it was reflective of external complications, but given the necessity of that separation, I can see how they might put it to narrative use: send her on a vision quest that reveals the true threat of this campaign. This sort of patchwork solution-finding is one of my favorite things about D&D; it’s like you’re attempting to write a story while that story is continuously rebelling against you, and thus you must plug leaks and erect scaffolding to keep the narrative from collapsing around you

Pike blames the Blackbriars’ curse, but the priestess says it’s actually her emotional problems. I get you Pike, sometimes we’d all like to blame our insecurities on meddling warlocks

“We know all about your spy, the Kestrel.” That’s two references to the rebellion’s mysterious Kestrel. Given we haven’t met or heard of anyone else it could be, I’m guessing the Kestrel is Percy’s sister, who’s been adopted into the Briarwood family

I appreciate the goofy super-deformed versions of the characters used for their extremely shitty battle strategies

Percy uses a mega-spyglass to find Archibald. Nice to see the character leaning into aspects of the artificer class beyond “they shoot people with guns”

The team splits up into two groups for their rescue mission, a choice which frankly seems like it’s just intended to give more characters something meaningful to do. When you’re infiltrating and you’ve got a rogue, the rogue basically handles all your checks; if you split the party up, suddenly a lot more players are mechanically relevant

That fact reflects a general source of tension in D&D: how lopsided player specializations interact with non-combat scenarios. In my own party, my character is The Charming One, meaning my superior charisma stats essentially necessitate I handle all negotiations for the team. This actually works well enough with our party, because I’m also the one most willing to embrace in-character conversation, but it still means that when the conflict is conversation, all the other players don’t really have much to do. Of course, you also don’t want the various members of your party to feel indistinguishable from each other, so it’s always a balancing act of specialization versus general utility, and the correct ratio will vary depending on your own player group’s preferences

Very relatable moment of Vax presumably rolling three critical misses in a row on his lockpicking check

Actually laughed out loud at Percy just plummeting on top of the other two, then calmly stating “I fell out of the window.” The jokes are really cooking at this point

Interestingly, the two player groups seem to be having opposite problems: the front infiltration goes too well, while the back infiltration goes too poorly. The DM thus blesses each of them with an appropriate narrative twist: the front infiltration is complicated by the rebels breaking protocol, while the back infiltration is helped out by a guard actively opening an unbreakable door

You want to create a relatively even level of “challenging but surmountable” obstacles for your players, but the whims of dice rolls make fools of us all, and so sometimes the DM has to put their hand on the scales and actively edit the challenges

Another very relatable player moment, as Vax has absolutely no difficulty with the next locked door, and uses this as proof that the back door was bullshit

More nice action choreography as the party is discovered. The show’s predilection towards compositions with lots of foreground obstruction really helps elevate sequences like this, as it’s good at creating a sense of chaos and claustrophobia. Soft focus objects whipping through the foreground really enhances the sense that folks are tripping over each other as they fight

Archibald claims he’ll make a distraction to let the others escape, which is very brave of him, even if it renders this rescue mission entirely pointless

Percy sees a chance to take out Stonefell, one of his primary targets. Classic yet effective trick of rendering his glasses opaque when he surrenders to his anger; the eyes are the windows to the soul, and thus concealing a character’s eyes is a natural way to imply they’ve taken on some monstrous or unrecognizable aspect

It seems like Percy has made some specific pact regarding the fulfillment of his revenge; his eyes glow black as he kills Stonefell, and then the name evaporates off his pistol

And at last, Archibald drops the reveal: “Percy, your sister lives!”

And the punchline is the second reveal: she’s working with the Blackbriars. We’re all set for the next act!

And Done

Alright, an old-fashioned rescue mission! Well, I say that, but constructing a rescue mission out of D&D building blocks is actually a somewhat tricky affair, as this episode quietly indicated. Both the pluses and minuses of a largely non-combat-oriented conflict shined through: we got lots of moments where the characters were able to flex through unique and character-specific solutions, and also some moments where the DM had to do some impromptu patchwork to get the players where they needed to be. On the other hand, Vox Machina’s character work continues to improve rapidly, with this arc’s Percy focus doing an excellent job of raising him from archetype to individual. I can’t wait for the family reunion!

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